LONDON — You can forgive British Prime Minister David Cameron for failing to define Magna Carta on the Late Show with David Letterman last year.

The Latin translation of the words — “Great Charter” — is the easy bit. The trickier thing is to work out what the 1215 document really signified.

Was it a rallying cry for justice, freedom and the rule of law, echoing down the ages, across the globe? Or was it just the squealing of the grandest barons in the land, incensed at a king who was bleeding their coffers dry?

The answer is, a bit of both. As the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta approaches, you can decide for yourself, as the four original copies are exposed as never before.

Two are in the British Library, in London, the third is at Salisbury Cathedral, about 140 kilometres southwest of London. The fourth — Lincoln Castle’s original — went on show at the weekend in St. Albans Cathedral — some 40 kilometres north of London — where the barons first met King John’s representative, probably on August 4 1213 — 800 years ago. It will then go to Bury St. Edmunds, and on to the Law Library of Congress in Washington.

Magna Carta was revered by the U.S. Founding Fathers in the 18th century, who saw it as a defining document of resistance against an overbearing king. You will need Medieval Latin to read Magna Carta in the original, in fading brown ink on parchment. But even non-Latinists can make out the most heart-stirring lines, like “Data per manum nostram in prato quod vocatur Ronimed inter Windlesoram et Stanes, quinto decimo die Junii, anno regni nostri decimo septimo.”

Those are the last words of Magna Carta, stamped with the seal of King John — “Given by our hand in the meadow called Runnymede, between Windsor and Staines, on the 15th day of June, in the 17th year of our reign.”

The words were largely drafted, not by the king and the barons, but by chancery clerks toiling away far from the historic scene that June day. And, if you look closely at those words, in English or Latin, you’ll see that the charter is dominated by contemporary disputes between the barons and the king, with not much left over for timeless cries for freedom and justice.

Some of the clauses — the original document was divided into 63 clauses in 1759 — are surprisingly prosaic: “All fish-weirs shall be removed from the Thames, the Medway, and throughout the whole of England, except on the sea coast.”

Many other clauses concentrate on lifting the king’s burden of taxation on the barons. Some clauses are pretty outrageous by modern standards: “If anyone who has borrowed a sum of money from Jews dies before the debt has been repaid, his heir shall pay no interest on the debt for so long as he remains underage, irrespective of whom he holds his lands.”

To work out what the point of Magna Carta was, you must look at the history immediately preceding it. That history is largely about John tapping the barons for the cash and soldiers needed to win back Normandy.

“Magna Carta was the first program of reform in English history,” says David Horspool, historian and author of The English Rebel — One Thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties. “But it wasn’t the culmination of decades of struggle and debate, it was the by-product of a more venal agenda, controlled for the most part by men who put their own welfare some way ahead of abstract principle. What exhausted the barons’ patience wasn’t losing Normandy but trying to get it back. To do that, John needed the military support of his chief subjects, and he needed money.”

On two occasions John had failed to raise expeditions to take back Normandy, because the barons refused to play ball. They had had enough of a king who demanded much more of them than his predecessors. John doubled the rate of scutage — shield money, paid instead of military service. On other occasions, John fined them arbitrarily to “obtain the king’s good will.”

Matters came to a head in May 1214, when the king, fighting in France, demanded more scutage, and the barons refused to pay, especially the ones in the north. The rebel barons can claim to be the first named political party in English history, popularly named “the Northerners” — as opposed to “the Army of God,” which is what they preferred to call themselves.

At this point, something in John gave way. Rather than declaring war on the barons, he resorted to negotiation. At first, he considered re-granting an old charter, sealed by his grandfather, Henry I, on his coronation in 1100.

John promised he would give a definite answer on re-granting it by the Sunday after Easter, 1215. When he missed the deadline, the negotiations continued, with Stephen Langton, the Archbishop of Canterbury, as intermediary.

The king dithered so much that the barons withdrew their fealty — or their loyalty — from him. Forty rebel barons were so angry that they occupied London in protest. Drawn into further negotiations, the two parties drew up a document, the Articles of the Barons. This was sealed by the king on June 15 — the Magna Carta was born.

With that kind of buildup, you can see why so much of the Magna Carta is about taxes. The charter’s second clause limits the money paid to the king out of inheritances to “100 pounds for a whole barony . . . 100 shillings, at most, for a whole knight’s fee”.

Another clause strictly forbids the king’s arbitrary fines: “All fines made with us unjustly and against the law of the land and all amercements imposed unjustly and against the law of the land, shall be entirely remitted.”

Still, in among the tax-cutting pleas, there are some unprecedented, selfless calls for legal and social reform. One much-repeated clause reads: “To no one will we sell, to no one will we deny or delay right or justice.”

Other clauses refer to “freemen” — a class considerably below the barons. The opening clause reads: “We have granted also, and given to all the Freemen of our Realm, for Us and our Heirs for ever, these Liberties underwritten, to have and to hold to them and their Heirs, of Us and our Heirs for ever.”

In one clause — again, about the levying of fines — there is even a reference to villeins, peasants legally tied to the lord of the manor, who were no more than serfs. It is these few altruistic clauses that resonated down the centuries, that meant the Magna Carta was repeatedly confirmed by monarchs for the next two centuries.

But the Magna Carta may have been lost in the mists of time if John hadn’t died of dysentery in October 1216, supposedly after a blowout feast. John in fact rejected the Magna Carta, principally because of its last clause, giving the barons a licence to rebel if the king reneged on the deal. It was his son, the nine-year-old Henry III, who went along with the document in a bid to shore up his support.

It was a close-run thing, and a long time before the Magna Carta was hailed as the miraculous document of today. In many ways, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman came closest to the truth in their comedy classic, 1066 and all That — “Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People).”

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